Starting Up Is Hard to Do

Since February, I have enjoyed writing about my experiences of attempting to startup a business while working a day job. This past month, however, has been a bear for me. In the Rackspace office, our team has been going full tilt, producing content for our channels and campaigns. We have ramped up content production not just for the Rackspace blog, but also have produced a large number of videos and articles that live offsite. Outside the office, I have been planning a wedding along with moving and combining two houses into one smaller house and finding tenants for the houses we moved out of.  Things have been busy.

One thing you may overlook when starting a business is the actual place — the location — where you will do the work. Whether you are committing to the business 100 percent of the time, or you are moonlighting after your day job, you will need to find a physical space to get things done. Here are some suggestions on where to work as well as the pros/cons of each of them.

Communication is key as you begin working with potential clients and customers. Fortunately, there are many tools in the cloud that can help you connect with clients in ways that are more interactive than just emailing a PowerPoint presentation. Here are some of the tools that I have found useful in communicating with customers.

For the past two weeks I have talked about what startups can gain by having a booth at a conference, as well as some of my missteps. To wrap up this series on exhibiting at my first conference, I want to talk about some things that went really well that you can hopefully use at your next — or your first — conference.

Last week I wrote about some of the benefits that a startup can achieve by having a booth at a conference. In this post, I focus on some of the lessons that my partner and I learned by attending a conference. If you exhibit regularly, you are sure to get a good laugh at our missteps and the lessons learned, but I hope I can help out any newbies exhibiting at a conference.

This past week, I manned my first ever booth at a conference to promote our startup. Although I have been to plenty of conferences before, this was the first time I was on the other side of the table. I learned a lot from attending this event, and over the next several weeks I will write about things that I did that worked really well along with some lessons learned, but to start off, here are three things that a startup can gain from having a booth at a conference.

Entrepreneurs have become the 21st Century Cowboy. The idea of starting something from scratch, bucking the security of a bi-monthly company paycheck and venturing out to the great unknown to strike it rich calls back to the ethos of the cowboy. Waylon could very well update his song to be “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to do startups.”

My partner and I formally pitched our startup for the very first time last week. We had a mix of apprehension, excitement and nerves. While there are others with more experience to talk about the nuts and bolts of a perfect pitch, I wanted to write about my experience; both the good and the bad.

One of the things that I find difficult about starting a business is putting together the marketing collateral. In most large companies, there are entire departments devoted to this task, but most likely it is an afterthought in your mind. You probably don’t have the time or resources to do it properly and let it sit on the backburner.

I think that there is one trap that all aspiring entrepreneurs fall into – wanting to keep their idea a secret so someone doesn’t steal it. I know I have fallen victim to this numerous times (and probably will succumb to keeping future ideas on the down-low as well), but keeping your idea a secret only prevents you from realizing the full potential of it.